Have you ever spent 20 minutes looking for a file on your Windows PC that you just knew was there, but couldn’t find?
Here’s a free tool that has helped me numerous times.
XYPlorer is a portable file manager for Windows with a powerful file search capability. Portable means that it can be placed on a USB flash drive (like the Ironkey) for use when needed. Unlike Google Desktop or Windows Desktop Search, you only have to run XYPlorer when you want to use it.
While the most recent version requires purchase, the freeware version 5.55 is still generally available from the Portable Freeware Collection and other places.
Here’s a screen shot of XYPlorer:
On the upper left you can see a tree view to navigate along the directories on your computer. This area functions much like the explorer built into Windows. Just to the right is the results window. The search area, which is what will help you the most in finding files, is on the bottom.
Notice that the search area has 7 tabs to help you specify your search. In this image you can see the Name & Location tab, on which I have entered “build” for the name, and F: for the location. Other tabs which are extremely useful include “Contained Text” which allows you to search inside documents. “Exclude Folders” allows you to eliminate directories or sub directories from your search.
You can see that XYPlorer has found 2 subdirectories on the F: drive which contain the word “build”. It has also found 8 documents on F: which contain the word “build” in their names. This search took less than 10 seconds to complete on my Toshiba Centrino laptop running on power saver mode.
Under a tight deadline and must find a file?- XYPlorer could help.
Enjoy!
Alec
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